


beauty in the aftermath

by SashaSea (SHCombatalade)



Series: coin toss universe [5]
Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Future Fic, Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-25 00:06:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9793697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SHCombatalade/pseuds/SashaSea
Summary: The Savannah Knights OC's before, during, and after the "coin toss universe"





	1. Ellie

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Отголоски прекрасного](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13503945) by [jana_nox](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jana_nox/pseuds/jana_nox), [WTF_Young_Adult_2018](https://archiveofourown.org/users/WTF_Young_Adult_2018/pseuds/WTF_Young_Adult_2018)



> Ellie is in their apartment when they finally get back to Savannah; neither of them is alarmed. She’s the only other member of the Knights who has a key, and the dresser in the spare bedroom is one full drawer of her things by now.

The media never asks about his past, and it takes a good two years for him to realize that they’re probably bound under the same gag order he is. They never ask about his past, or allude to it, or implicate his involvement. But sometimes, when they think he’s not giving them enough of himself, they like to remind him of it.

There’s a startling similarity between mob families and sports media - they know everything, and they don’t mind getting messy. “Nathaniel!” he hears the name called over the clamor of _Neil_ or _Josten_ ; it stands out like a wolf among sheep - silent, and deadly. It’s only the visceral response his body has to the word (he knows to duck and dodge when the bullets start flying, knows to balance his weight on the balls of his feet when they come at him with a knife, and he knows to move _with_ the punch instead of against it. He hears the name and his body does all three, ducks and readies to run and leans away from the impact) that even has him hearing it over the noise.

There’s another thing shared between the two: Neil is not scared of either.

The man who called him by the wrong name has a camera trained at his face, ready to capture the shot of the striker’s full attention, and he doesn’t seem to realize the mistake he’s made, even when Neil holds a hand out to silence every other reporter in the room to stalk over with Nathaniel’s smile firmly in place.

The lens of the camera drops a fraction of an inch, the hand holding it suddenly unsteady, and maybe he realizes it then.

“Smile for the camera, Nate!”

Ellie’s arm is around his shoulders, cheek pressed far too close to his, and she pulls his body flush against her side; her fingernails dig into the skin of his hip, hand tucked beneath his jersey. The flash goes off and Neil shoves her away, mostly in protest to the way he knows yet another website will be tearing their relationship apart beneath America’s microscope before the hour is up. “Fuck you, Rosie,” he snarls in return.

It sounds a bit like _thank you_.

* * *

They hadn’t been allowed nicknames on the Ravens.

That was the first thing she noticed - not the artificial dark of the Nest, painted in thick layers of matte black. It was the way her roommate, a second-year and second-line defensive dealer, had called herself Brittany even though her sister called her Britt. And then Cassandra next door, who put her name into Ellie’s contacts as “Cassie B” but then flinched when she read it back. Even Harold, who had the most unfortunate first name of them all, didn’t respond to Josh like he did on Facebook.

So she was Roselie for the first time since she was seven years old, and as much as she hated it (hated more the father who gave it to her, but the two were too intertwined in her head to be separated), it was a small price to pay for playing for the best American team.

(She came to find, not even days later, that the name wasn’t the price at all; it was the ante just to be dealt into the game. The price was the pain, and she paid it in full.) 

* * *

By the time Roselie was in her fifth year, she’d managed to play seven thousand, three hundred, and eighty minutes of games - exactly one full season.

It wasn’t that she was terrible - she was good enough to have caught the Ravens’ attention back in secondary school, to be offered the scholarship and the funding to fly her to America for university. It was just that she was a striker, and for two and a half of those years she’d passed her time cheering Riko and Kevin on from the bench with no hope of ever playing a game. Then Kevin had his accident and had fucked off for South Carolina, of all places, and Riko had gone a little bit crazy after that.

( _Craz **ier**_ , none of them admitted, because if Riko was insane then they all were for following him.)

After that she and the other second-line striker were split between the halves, and she pulled a full season in two years and had a pro contract lined up by the Thanksgiving before her graduation.

At Christmas, she met Nathaniel.

 _Nathaniel_ , they were told, or _Wesninski_ on the court, even though every single one of them knew Neil Josten of the Foxes and Wesninski was a pain in the ass to try and call out. They weren’t allowed nicknames on the Ravens, or aliases, or errors. The first time a player called him Josten they’d all had to do suicides until every last one of them threw up, and then there wasn’t a second time - in the end it was easier to call him nothing at all. They were all experts in ignoring things, anyway.

Twelve days into his sixteen day stay, Nathaniel caught Roselie in the stomach with a racquet and immediately sent her to her knees, gasping and heaving. She kicked a shoe print into his stomach in retaliation.

* * *

Six and a half years later, Ellie - she hasn’t been Roselie since she graduated. They lost the season and they lost their leader and they all lost their minds a bit, and they definitely lost contact after they went their separate ways. The only people she sees from the Nest are her coach and two of the second line players whose names she didn’t bother to learn the first time around, all years her senior. - walks into the locker room and nearly walks right back out again.

“Jones,” Neil is suited up in a practice jersey that says JOSTEN in gold letters, and he doesn’t say hello or even smile at her, but he doesn’t call her Roselie either.

It doesn’t help. “Wesninski.”

She watches the way Andrew’s back goes tense and his fists go white, and she knows all about the rivalry that brought them here. She doesn’t believe a word of it - she’d been at the banquet, and she also knows about what brought Neil to Evermore all those years ago. When Neil laughs at her, it’s hollow and cold; it feels comforting, like being back in the matte black universe of the Ravens.

Ellie has nightmares at least four nights a week and three broken ribs that never healed properly. She hasn’t spoken to her family since she was seventeen years old and has no idea how to start now. She has five years of her life that she dances around the memory of and she’s never spoken a word of it to anybody because she doesn’t have a single person in her life that isn’t paid to be around her. Sometimes she stays up and wonders if they all ended up like this, or if she’s just the only one who can’t handle it.

Neil stops laughing, and looks at her the same way he had before he’d driven the handle of his racquet into her stomach - like he’s going to die, but he’s going to enjoy taking her out first. “You’ve let yourself get slow, Rosie.”

It’s a challenge and a truce all in one, the perfect _fuck you_ to the Nest’s memory, and she grins. “Don’t make me kick your ass again, Nate.”

* * *

“Smile for the camera, Nate!”

Ellie sees the way Neil’s body loosens like it does when he’s about to get punched and the way he face tightens like it does when he’s about to throw the first one, and she grabs the smaller striker before he can take another step - the worst he can do is still far from the worst she’s ever had. It’s too easy, in the moment where his brain and his body haven’t quite synced, to pull him into a haphazard embrace, and she slides a hand beneath his shirt to gouge half-moons into the already scarred side of his torso.

The camera goes off and the moment passes - this is the one thing they can do for the other than no one else can: recognize when the darkness is caused by an underground court where it’s always midnight, and remind them that they got out. Usually it’s Neil who finds her in the supply closet after a loss, shaking and weak, and has to drag her out with a too-tight grip and snarled “Get it the fuck together, Rosie.” But sometimes it’s him with the vacant look in his eye, the sneer on his face, and mostly it’s Andrew who manhandles him when he’s like that, but sometimes - _sometimes_ it’s her. _Smile for the camera_ , _Nate_ , she reminds him where they are, and who he is not.

“Fuck you, Rosie.”


	2. Magda

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> On Magda’s other side, Andrew hides a snort in his glove. “Don’t talk to him,” and his voice is sharp but his gaze is not; his least threatening offer. “He’s a terrible influence.”

Andrew gets traded to the Knights from a team that just didn’t want him anymore, regardless of his stats.

He’s not exactly pleasant when they meet him, but he’s not exactly unpleasant either - he doesn’t talk to any of them, responds with one or two word phrases to the coach, and mostly just looks like he’d like to kill them but can’t muster up the energy to do so. He also shuts down the goal without breaking a sweat, and that’s enough for any of them to forgive even the worst of his tendencies.

Magda likes challenges.

She and her sister used to get in trouble with their parents for trying to tame the stray dogs in the favela, slipping them scraps of food and kind words and sometimes sneaking them into the house to sleep in bed with them. Most of them were grateful for the attention, licking the last of the crumbs from her fingertips - but one, a wire-haired mutt with a missing ear, ignored the treat entirely and went after her instead. The attack only made her more determined: it took seven months before the bow-legged dog, who came to be called Cascão, let her stroke the soft fur on the underside of his remaining ear.

Of the hundreds of strays she coaxed into her pack over the years, only one ever turned on her; she didn’t need to put in the effort toward earning his trust. It’s not that she likes the reward and more that she likes the challenge.

Andrew reminds her a lot of Cascão - he looks just about as mean as he actually is, and Magda is absolutely going to be his friend.

* * *

They weren’t allowed to play Exy, she and her sister, not at first. It was too violent a sport for girls, and what if they broke their nose or knocked out their teeth - her  _Mãezinha_ said that Exy would make them ugly. So only their older brothers got to play, and when everyone else was asleep Magda and her sister would steal the balls and practice throwing them across the bed they shared, back and forth. During the day they made make-shift racquets out of old brooms and the washing, and they snuck three streets over to practice catching. It wasn’t real, not for them, so it didn’t matter if they were any good or not. 

Then puberty hit, and suddenly  _Mãezinha_ said that it was okay if Magda wanted to play because she was already ugly, and she picked up a real racquet for the first time.

As it turns out, Magda was good. She was more than good, and after a few years none of the boys in the favela wanted to play with her anymore.

* * *

Her sister turned seventeen and a month later Magda turned sixteen, and a month after that they packed everything they they could fit into a backpack each and they left for the United States.

Luciana was going to be a model. Magda was going to be a professional Exy player. They’d had it all planned from the time they were young, whispers on sleepless nights and hasty scribbles on scraps of cloth, of bigger futures then their small house could hold.

Instead, they’d barely even made it to Costa Rica when Luciana whispered that she thought she might be pregnant, squeezing shaking hands around the rosary she’d been given for her tenth birthday. It took three agonizing minutes for the gas station test to turn positive, and three and a half minutes for Luciana to make up her mind. “I can’t do this alone,” she whispered against her younger sister’s shoulder - Magda was the anchor that held her together, wrapping strong arms around Luciana’s delicate ribs where her heart beat like a hummingbird trapped under her skin.

It was probably true. “The baby’s father-”

“I don’t know who it is,” Luciana admitted.

It took three minutes for the test to turn positive and three and half for Luciana to decide, but it took only a blink for Magda. “Then we will do it together,” and she held her sister close. “I will make us millions of dollars playing Exy, and then I will pay for you to go to school and be a fashion designer. You never wanted to be a model anyway, you just liked the clothes.” Luciana’s tears hiccuped into a laugh.

It’s going to be a challenge. Magda likes challenges.

* * *

Enzo turns thirteen and Luciana’s boutique in the Historic District opens a second location downtown, and Magda sits on the bench across the way from Andrew with a smile. “Welcome to the Knights,” she tells him, and Andrew doesn’t acknowledge she has even spoken.

The following practice she compliments a save he made and he walks away mid-sentence. Magda wonders if Andrew doesn’t care much for rewards either.

“My nephew says you are his third favorite player,” she tells him a week later, and he pauses just long enough to let her know that he’s heard. “In the league, not on the team.”

Four days after that Andrew finally looks at her long enough for her to know what color his eyes are. “Who’s the second?” He asks like he doesn’t give a damn about the answer, but it’s the first thing he’s said to any of them off the court.

“I am.”

He tilts his head to the side, considering, and Magda stands very very still like she learned from Cascão. She even holds her breath, wills her heart to beat quietly, just forces her body to  _freeze_  because this will either end with a beaten challenge or a bitten hand. “Who’s the first?”

She grins. “Also me.” When the question on his face falls into complete disregard, she knows that she has won. “My nephew loves me very much,” she tells the back of his head as he ignores her.

* * *

After the first game of the season, Andrew turns to her and asks why she keeps talking him -  _ask_ is too strong a word. He turns to her mid story about Enzo learning to ride a bike, and snarls “What the fuck do you  _want?”_

Cascão had growled in the beginning as well, but mostly for show. He had been entirely silent before he lunged for her hand, and so she only worried when she  _couldn’t_  see his teeth. “I just think you need a friend,” and he gets that sideways considering look again.

“I don’t.”

He doesn’t say he already has friends, just that he doesn’t need them. Andrew has been in Savannah for three months now and he’s never spent time with the team outside of practice. He’s never been late, or asked off, or left early because of other plans. She’s never seen him even take a phone call. “You can’t just be all about Exy.”

For a moment she thinks this is when he attacks - instead of snarling or glaring or walking away, he looks her dead in the eye and he  _smiles_. “I fucking hate Exy,” he speaks slowly and clearly, still smiling, and it’s the only time she’s ever felt afraid of him - maybe she pushed too far. Maybe this is why the other team didn’t want him.

Their teammates are around them. Security guards. If he was going to hurt her, it wouldn’t be here. “You made it your career,” she reminds him gently, “and moved across the country for a new team. Sounds like you love it.”

The smile drops and the stare hardens and she releases her breath when he snarls at her again. “Like you did?” She’d told him, of course, the story of why she came to America. She just didn’t think he’d been listening. “Don’t project feelings onto me because you want to find common ground.”

She lets him leave the locker room, and she leaves him alone the next few weeks.

* * *

“What do you want?” he asks the next time she sits across from him; her locker is an entire row over.

“You remind me of a dog I knew,” she informs him, and passes an open container of her sister’s cookies; he takes two, and glares at her. She’s been bringing her sister’s baking for as long as she’s played for the team, but she saves the cookies for herself. The first time she offered one to Andrew, he’d hesitated before taking one, like he thought it was some form of contract. “It took seven months of treats before he let me pet him.”

Andrew glances at the cookies with narrowed eyes. “If you try and pet me, I will break your arm.”

She places another two cookies on the bench beside him. “It’s only been four months.”

He eats the cookies.

* * *

Magda decides that she doesn’t much like Neil Josten from the very first time she encounters him. He’s in the stands, and also on the jumbotron, talking about how he hates Andrew. Then she meets him on the court and he sneers something in Russian that must be offensive because Andrew looks ready to break his neck, and he checks Clark so hard that it breaks his nose.

In the locker room, she gives Andrew the whole container of her sister’s cookies for the shakedown he gave Josten after the game. “I sort of want to kill that guy,” she gestures at the television in the corner. The highlight reel is mostly Josten getting ejected from the game, smiling around blood that is probably not his.

Andrew offers her one of the cookies back as a reward.

* * *

Josten joins the Knights the following off season, and Magda thinks it’s going to be a disaster for all of thirty-five minutes - he says something in German this time that has Andrew about to leap for the throat, but instead he scores a goal and laughs and laughs. Andrew returns the ball with perfect accuracy into the side of Josten’s helmet, and he snarls.

“I hate you,” he growls like he means it, and Magda knows he does. Means it in the way he hates Exy, and her sister’s cookies, and Enzo’s hero worship. In the way that she would say loves.

After the practice, she throws an arm around Neil’s shoulders and smiles at him. “I change my mind,” she tells him, though he wouldn’t know what she’s changed it from. “This is a great idea.”

Magda likes challenges, and these boys are very,  _very_ challenging.


	3. Clark

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The first time they met, Neil had broken Clark’s nose (it hadn’t healed straight). Now they get together every Thursday at the local gym’s indoor climbing wall.
> 
> (Note: this chapter contains multiple references to racist, sexist, and homophobic language/thinking, as well as a single use of a homophobic slur)

Clark’s mom left when he was six years old.

He remembers her, a little - remembers that she had brown hair and blue eyes, and she always wore the pink apron when she made dinner but the green one when she made pancakes. He remembers that her best friend was a quiet man with a big beard who always used to ruffle his hair when he came to visit. He remembers that they used to grow sunflowers, or maybe daffodils, by the front door.

Mostly, he remembers the way that Junior woke up on his tenth birthday to an empty kitchen and an apology hastily scribbled into a card.

* * *

Clark - _Brian_ , because he wasn’t Clark until he moved out of the state and was the only one around - was six and Hunter was eight and Junior was ten, and suddenly they were three boys being raised by a single father who didn’t know what to do with children.

Well, it was less that he didn’t know what to do with children and more that he didn’t know how to do any of the things to do with children - Bill Clark had never learned to cook, because he’d left his mother’s house for the one he shared with his wife. He didn’t know what all the settings on the washer and dryer meant, and he definitely didn’t know how to fold clothes or whose socks belonged to who. He didn’t know how to do much with the children beyond make them real men, like he was, because everything else?

Well, that was a woman’s job.

“Used to be,” he told the three boys - young men, he called them, because if they were young men then they would be strong and tough and brave and stop crying at night for the mother who walked out on them - sitting at the table and waiting twenty minutes for the pasta that he wasn’t sure was done cooking yet, “A man could have folks to do all this for him. Before the war.”

There was only one war in Ranburne, Alabama.

“Now that’s _not allowed_ ,” he told them, angry, as he opened the can of store-bought cheese sauce and poured uneven amounts over each plate of sticky, balled-up spaghetti. The plates were paper, because the only time he’d tried to run the dishwasher he’d flooded the entire kitchen with bubbles and hadn’t cared to try again. “Not that I’d want one of those kinds in my house anyway,” he continued, and Hunter and Junior nodded like they at least understood what he was talking about.

* * *

He learned what they were talking about the next time they were at the gas station and a minivan with a black family in it pulled up behind them. “Used to be,” he told the young men crammed on the bench seat of the truck beside him, “those kinds had to use a different pump from the rest of us.”

“What happened?” Brian asked, because he knew about the war like he knew his dad hadn’t fought in it, was too long ago. All he knew was that it was Us and Them and Those Kinds, and they didn’t talk about it at school.

His dad glared daggers into the rearview mirror. “Liberal communists.”

* * *

Brian learned how to play football as soon as he learned how to sit up, and then how to actually play it as soon as he could walk.

Then, when he got to middle school, he learned how to play Exy.

* * *

He was twelve years old the first time he heard someone actually say “the n-word” instead of just, you know, the n-word itself, and it was the principal as she suspended him from school for the week.

“We do not tolerate that at this school,” her voice was shrill, like throwing plates against the wall; he wanted to ask why he was being suspended for intolerance in the same breath as being told he was intolerable, but didn’t want another paper sent home calling him a smart-ass. “And your father and will be having a discussion about this when he comes to collect you.”

Didn’t do much good, their discussion. Brian was made in his father’s image.

* * *

“Hey Dad,” Brian was sixteen now, and the only Clark boy left - Junior was in Montgomery now, working some form of construction job that their father referred to only as ‘good, honest work’ and Hunter had moved to Birmingham with his girl after her father had caught them in the back of the pickup truck after the Fourth of July fireworks and threatened to shoot him. “Mr. Lawrence says he thinks I should go to college.”

“Mr. Lawrence,” his dad told him, and handed him a beer, “is a fucking faggot.”

It may or may not have been true - Mr. Lawrence wasn’t married, and he wore glasses, and he taught English Literature. According the the Clark Code, those were all things that were fairly exclusively for women and homosexuals. “Well I don’t want to go to college anyway,” because he didn’t. College meant more math, and more books, and more school. He pretty much hated the little amount he had to do now. “Coach says he thinks I could go pro.”

His dad beamed at him. “Been my dream since you could walk, to see you playing for the Falcons.”

“Not football, Dad.” And this was the part that had been rehearsed all week, quietly under his breath. “Exy.”

There was a moment where he thought his father was sad, but instead he shrugged and raised his beer. “Well,” he passed his approval down with a single toast, “it’s _European_ ,” and that was another hallmark of Mr. Lawrence’s kind, “but you get to break bones like a real man.”

* * *

He liked it, that the Knights called him Clark - reminded him of home. Of the entire town referring to them as ‘the Clark boys’ and of going home to ‘the old Clark house’ and stranger’s knowing him immediately as ‘Clark’s youngest.’ It was like a title. He was Savannah’s Clark, and Junior was Montgomery’s, and Hunter was Birmingham’s. And his dad was, and would always be, Ranburne’s.

* * *

It wasn’t strange for him, sharing a locker room with people of the darker skinned kind than him - for all his father’s bitching and moaning, there’d been a decent number of those kinds of boys on his football team. And Clark didn’t have the problem with it his dad did, either - Randall was the best goddamn tight end he’d ever seen, and his mama was the best cook Clark knew, and she never minded setting an extra place or making up the guest bed for him.

It _was_ strange, though, sharing it with women.

“You here to do the laundry?” he asked one of the girls on his first day - she was already carrying one jersey, after all, so he figured she wasn’t just here for a visit.

She gave him a look that pretty much informed him exactly how much she’d like to kick him in the balls, and then she did.

* * *

It made it easier, checking a girl for the first time, that it was Jones.

Didn’t ease the phantom pain between his legs he still got whenever she laced her shoes up, but it did ease the twinge of shame he got from hitting a girl.

* * *

It was strange, getting starstruck over a pro Exy player when he was one himself, but Clark was fucking over the moon to play Josten’s team - he didn’t own a jersey, mostly because wearing another man’s name like that was a little bit, well, _European_  (he learned he wasn’t supposed to use the f-word either, and apparently not the g-one, and even the h-one that sounded all scientific and shit was off limits, and sometimes Clark wondered how the fuck he was supposed to say anything at all if people kept getting pissed about it), but he wasn’t above asking for an autograph after the game.

Instead, Josten headbutts him in the face and slams him into the wall and breaks his nose and would probably do more but the ref calls him off like a trained bear.

All he did was take Josten’s side against the Minyard fr- He grimaced around the pain in his face. How many f-words were there?

* * *

Two weeks after Josten joins the team, Clark gets a crash course in watching his fucking mouth.

He figures sometimes the not allowed words are okay, but only when you’re trash-talking on the court. Not all of them, of course: he’d decided as soon as he’d learned what they all meant that the race ones were pretty shitty of him, especially since he wasn’t actually a racist (he wasn’t, he explained to Jones as soon as he’d gotten his breath back and stopped throwing up. He just didn’t know they let girls play professional sports). But the ones about being _European_  were fine, especially because he couldn’t just call them girls.

Because, you know, he played with girls all the time. And they were really fucking good at it.

So he calls a player a fucking f-word right before they throw down, and everything is fine, except after the game Josten headbutts him again with his helmet still on and has to be dragged off him by Beckett and Jones both. “Watch your fucking mouth,” he tells Clark calmly, like he hasn’t just attacked his own team, and he slinks off to the showers.

* * *

It embarrasses him, how much he wants Neil to like him.

So Clark watches his fucking mouth.

* * *

Later, when he realizes Neil is actually his friend and Andrew is actually, well, still objectively terrible but not as bad as he thought, and he spends more time with them and Ellie and Magda then he does at his own apartment, he starts to make sure everyone else watches their fucking mouths too.

* * *

“Oh my god,” he looks around the table, and at his empty glass - his third, so he’s not drunk yet but he’s feeling a bit more hopeless than he usually does. “I’m that guy.”

“Probably,” Andrew says, but doesn't elaborate. He doesn't talk much, which is more than okay with Clark because Neil and Ellie and Magda talk too much, and sometimes Clark wants to offer to do something just with Andrew so they can both have some peace and quiet for a bit. Wants to, but doesn't - he's pretty sure Andrew hates him, like _actually_ hates him, and not in the way he hates the cats or the girls. (And _definitely_ not in the way he hates Neil.)

Ellie and Neil share one of those glances that the others are never included on - not the ones when things are bad, though they all know what to look for then, too. This is the one when they're agreeing not to laugh, while actually laughing. “What guy?” Neil finally asks, and does a terrible job of not laughing at him.

“ **That Guy** ,” he tries again, because somehow actually referring to himself as the stereotypical redneck asshole from Alabama feels a little bit like a betrayal, and referring to himself as the token white friend is potentially racially insensitive.

Magda leans up to kiss his cheek, and then immediately pinches the spot red between her fingers. “Yeah,” she agrees. “You are.”


End file.
